[time_to_smile]

> having a deep understanding of statistics?

As someone with a strong background in statistics, please tell me where I can find DS jobs that require this.

For me and all my statistics friends in DS we find much more frustration in how hard it is to pass DS interviews when you understand problems deeper than "use XGBoost". I have found that very few data scientists really even understand basic statistics, I failed an interview once because an interviewer did not believe that logistic regression could be used to solve statistical inference questions (when it and more generally the GLM is the workhorse of statistical work).

And to answer your question, whenever I'm in a hiring manager position I very strongly value strong software engineering skills. DS teams made up of people that are closer to curious engineers tend to greatly outperform teams made up of researchers that don't know you can write code outside of a notebook.

[disgruntledphd2]

A good conceptual understanding of statistics is always helpful.

It's not really tested for in most places though, where they regard a DS as a service that produces models.